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The Legacy of Henry Martyn to the Study of India's Muslims and Islam in the Nineteenth Century

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The Legacy of Henry Martyn to the Study of India's Muslims and Islam in the Nineteenth Century THE LEGACY OF HENRY MARTYN TO THE STUDY OF INDIA'S MUSLIMS AND ISLAM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Avril A. Powell University of Lincoln (SOAS) INTRODUCTION: A biography of Henry Martyn, published in 1892, by George Smith, a retired Bengal civil servant, carried two sub-titles: the first, 'saint and scholar', the second, the 'first modern missionary to the Mohammedans. [1]In an earlier lecture we have heard about the forming, initially in Cambridge, of a reputation for spirituality that partly explains the attribution of 'saintliness' to Martyn: my brief, on the other hand, is to explore the background to Smith's second attribution: the late Victorian perception of him as the 'first modern missionary' to Muslims. I intend to concentrate on the first hundred years since his ordination, dividing my paper between, first, Martyn's relations with Muslims in India and Persia, especially his efforts both to understand Islam and to prepare for the conversion of Muslims, and, second, the scholarship of those evangelicals who continued his efforts to turn Indian Muslims towards Christianity. Among the latter I shall be concerned especially with an important, but neglected figure, Sir William Muir, author of The Life of Mahomet, and The Caliphate:ite Rise, Decline and Fall, and of several other histories of Islam, and of evangelical tracts directed to Muslim readers. I will finish with a brief discussion of conversion from Islam to Christianity among the Muslim circles influenced by Martyn and Muir. But before beginning I would like to mention the work of those responsible for the Henry Martyn Centre at Westminster College in recently collecting together and listing some widely scattered correspondence concerning Henry Martyn. It is unlikely now that the original correspondence, on which his nineteenth century biographers and editors based their publications of his journals and letters, will ever re-emerge. However, a great deal has now been recovered from other archives and from the correspondence of his colleagues and friends. I say this feelingly for most of my own work on Martyn was done some thirty years ago while attempting to establish a pre-history for a study of Muslim relations with missionaries later in the nineteenth century. Returning only recently to this subject, I certainly find that it is now possible to probe some hitherto unanswerable questions about Martyn with much more hope of finding answers as a result of the Centre's activities. I would also wish to mention two previous lectures in this series (unfortunately I was not able to attend the third). Brian Stanley's deconstruction of a popular image of Martyn that had been somewhat uncritically reverenced in evangelical tradition has helped to distinguish the mercilessly self-reproachful lonely 'sinner' of his own journals, from the rather companionable, often 'cheerful' priest frequently encountered in the diaries of others. I owe much too to Sebastian Kim's examination in his own lecture of some later Bible translation programmes in Asia, for I agree with those who consider that Martyn's most lasting legacy was his multi-lingual translations of the Bible for Muslim readers, though with effects that I hope my lecture will show, that were not always what he had intended. Because I come last in this series of lectures I am going to assume that the details of the life of Henry Martyn are already well known to you. PART I: MARTYN IN INDIA AND PERSIA: Considering his subsequent reputation as a 'missionary to Mohammedans', Henry Martyn's opportunities for contact with Muslims were extremely short- lived and restricted in nature. His entire residence in north India and Persia before his death in 1812, aged 31, occupied less than six years, the period of apprenticeship for most scholars before embarking on any serious translation or original publication. For most of that short time the East India Company's requirements that its employees, including chaplains, should avoid public preaching, prevented him from seeking the kind of close contact with Indians that he had originally envisaged. However, I agree with Brian Stanley, that he was anyway temperamentally unsuited to press his case with Hindus and Muslims as vigorously as some contemporary and later missionaries would choose to do. Before examining the legacy of his publishing and other activities I want to consider, first, the religious preconceptions and scholarly credentials he brought to religious debate with Muslims. Martyn shared the views of most of his generation about non-Christian religious systems. After a few months in India he contrasted, 'the holiness of the word of God...to the mock majesty of the Koran, and the trifling, indecent stuff of the Ramayuna'. [2]His own evangelical upbringing, followed by a conversion experience at Cambridge, and a calling to evangelise in India, precluded any consideration of the bases of a Muslim's faith from the 'other's' perspective. His private thoughts were sometimes harsh indeed: Mahommedanism he wrote off, when particularly exasperated, as the 'damnable delusion of the devil', and Muhammad as a 'filthy debauchee'.[3]The reading he had done, mainly from seventeenth and eighteenth century writers, was, with one important exception, entirely controversial in respect to Islam. The exception, Martyn's main source of reference, once he reached India, was George Sale's English translation of the Al-Koran of Mohammed , first published in 1734.[4]As his journal tells us, he read Sale's Qur'an during his first slow journey up the Ganges from Calcutta to Patna, and then again when preparing for discussion with learned Muslims in Persia. As significant as the text itself, was the 'preliminary discourse' prefixed by Sale to his translation. This consists of a remarkable examination of the beliefs and practices Sale considered Muhammad had promulgated: erudite and soundly based, its author expressly intended to approve in Islam 'such particulars as seemed to me to deserve approbation', and to avoid 'all reproachful language'.[5] So much was this so that some of Sale's critics later charged that he had converted to Islam himself, a claim with no foundation. But if Martyn learned much from Sale, he remained uninfluenced, it seems, by the latter's remarkable capacity to stand aside from the legacy of medieval European invective against Islam. Martyn recorded after a year in Upper India that 'I read everything I can pick up about the Mahomedans', but he made no mention of ever studying, or even being aware of, the other important sources of Islamic knowledge, that in addition to the Qur'an, guide Muslims to religious understanding. [6]Study and reassessment of the collections of the hadith (the traditions or sayings of the Prophet, reported by those who had witnessed his mission), was being undertaken in some of the madrassas of northern India at precisely the time Martyn was resident there. The first English translation of the hadith was published in Calcutta while he was in India, but he made no mention of it.[7] Simultaneously, Orientalist scholarship in continental Europe, particularly in Paris and Vienna, was beginning to engage with a wide spectrum of Islamic scholarly disciplines as well as with philology by the time Martyn decided for India. The English universities had little contact with continental orientalism, and the embryonic Protestant missionary societies, under whose wing Martyn had first intended to go to India, had not yet established their training colleges, though several would do so almost immediately afterwards. Martyn thus remained unaware of current Islamic scholarship both in India and Europe, and consequently somewhat naively confident that the mere reading of the Qur'an was sufficent to understand the shortcomings in Islam that his evangelical conscience suggested to him. In contrast, his legatees in India, the evangelical European Islamists of the mid-nineteenth century would be very aware of the need to study the Islamic sciences in depth if they were to engage effectively in discussion of religion with Muslim 'ulama and sufis. In this perspective Martyn was a pioneer who, retrospectively, can be seen to have lacked the necessary scholarly support for his chosen role. No such criticism can be made of his linguistic preparations, for Martyn followed the same procedures as all British officers preparing for service in India, at a time when Persian was still the language of communication between the Indian states and of polite discourse between scholars, but when the appropriate vernaculars were also required. All who met him commented on his proficiency in Arabic, Persian and especially in 'Hindustani' (more usually now called 'Urdu'), the vernacular of north India. Apart from these three so-called 'Muslim' languages, he also studied Bengali and Sanskrit, though the latter he soon abandoned not only as very difficult, but also as unnecessary for his agreed task of producing scriptures mainly for Muslim readers. As his main literary legacy is rightly considered to be his Hindustani translation of the New Testament, it is worth noting that before leaving England, he took lessons in Hindustani from the most sought after scholar in this field. John Gilchrist had previously taught Hindustani at the Company's training college in Calcutta. His reputation was built in India on his dictionaries, grammars and reading books, but after resigning from Company employment, he took on the private tutoring of pupils such as Martyn. Gilchrist seems to have exerted influence beyond the narrowly linguistic: for he warned Martyn, already eager to leap into print, to beware of embarking too early on a translation of the Bible, when such translations have already proved, he said, 'the rock on which missions had split' [8]This is a somewhat strange comment at a time when missionary translation programmes had scarcely begun, but its relevance will become apparent later in the lecture.
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